• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, February 14, 2008

Companies that want to build brand loyalty should focus not only on communicating with their customers, but helping their customers communicate with each other, according to Peter Sheinbaum, the CEO of Daily Candy, a wildly successful email newsletter targeting young women with fashion and lifestyle content.

In fact, Sheinbaum, speaking at the Direct Marketing Association's Email Evolution conference, said he thinks of Daily Candy as a community, although it might look like a broadcast medium.

The success of Sheinbaum's creation speaks for itself. Founded eight years ago, Daily Candy now has newsletters in 13 American cities, one in London, a national edition, and five newsletters for young and expecting mothers. Overall it reaches 2.5 million subscribers. Its early growth was driven by email forwards, and now the company also tracks buzz about it on Internet platforms including chat rooms, forums, and blogs.

But "the community that is Daily Candy is people passing each other on the street," as well as friends talking on the phone, Sheinbaum said, casting a wide net. The company hosts philanthropic events where readers meet face to face.

Predicting that online populations will increasingly group themselves into "communities of interest," Sheinbaum advised the audience of marketers and publishers to mine their databases of subscribers and customers to discover commonalities, whatever they may be. Once these segments and subsegments are identified, he went on, the company should equip members of these groups to communicate with each other and form communities--all, of course, under the aegis of the company or brand.

Sheinbaum's advice seems to jibe with two studies from the United States and Britain which found that, respectively, 64% and 70% of online shoppers in those countries want consumer ratings and reviews on commercial Web sites. Respondents said these reviews would help inform both online and offline purchase decisions. The UK study was conducted by Jupiter Research and Bazaarvoice; the U.S. study by Forrester.